Speaker after speaker at the Nobel Week Dialogue emphasized that one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming decades will be bringing more of the world's population into the energy economy, providing them with access to electricity and the other benefits that can accompany it, like refrigeration for food and medical supplies. The benefits don't stop there; Richenda Van Leeuwen of the UN Foundation noted that simply having access to lighting in the developing world can increase family income by about 15 percent.

But it also matters how you get that energy. Van Leeuwen also noted that the indoor air pollution created by burning dirty fuels like wood and coal kills more people each year than malaria. The World Health Organization backs this up, putting the figure at two million deaths each year. The illnesses caused by this pollution can easily offset the 15 percent economic gain mentioned above through a combination of medical costs and lost productivity.

Electricity would be an obvious solution to this problem, but how you get that electricity matters. As we mentioned earlier, building or expanding an electric grid may take years where it's actually an option; direct power and microgrids may make more sense for the immediate future. And even where a grid is possible, large-scale fossil fuel facilities create their own problems. Turning to the WHO again, we see that urban air pollution kills 1.3 million people a year, primarily in middle-income countries, where the pollution is often a product of fossil fuels (partly power generation, partly transportation).

Further Reading

So the situation described in Gothenburg is complex. Getting people into the modern energy economy quickly can provide some significant health and economic benefits. But doing so with the wrong technologies can create problems of its own. There are some better options—former US Energy Secretary Steve Chu stated that burning coal kills 6,000 people for every one that has been killed due to nuclear power. But nuclear clearly has a lot of issues that make it inappropriate for many countries.

Was there any good news? Yes, and it came from Chu. He said that the DOE's latest figures show that wind turbines placed at sites that were in the department's top two categories now produced power that was cheaper than anything but natural gas, which places them ahead of both coal and nuclear.

This post is part of Ars' coverage of the 2013 Nobel Week Dialogue. It first appeared on the Dialogue's website.